Everything’s coming up roses for Alma Cater at Country Greenery … for the next five days in particular.
By the time the clock chimes midnight on Valentine’s Day, the Moorhead woman and her staff will have unpacked, refreshed, arranged and delivered somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 roses.
“It’s our busiest time of the year, by far,” Alma reports. Her two stores – the original in downtown Moorhead, and a second on 13th Avenue South in Fargo – call on a small army of holiday helpers to assist 25 regular employees in taming the ocean of blooms. That includes 20 extra delivery drivers, recruited to help the regulars bringing smiles all over town on Monday and Tuesday. “Nothing else is quite like it,” she adds, “though Mother’s Day is a strong second.”
She knows her business. Her passion for growing – planted during her childhood in St. Cloud – has propelled her through 42 years as one of Moorhead’s leading green thumbs. Her floral shop next to the tracks at Main and Fifth Street is one of the city’s oldest independent businesses still in the hands of their founders.
“I love growing … everything! Trees, bushes, flowers, vegetables, greenery – gardening is in my blood,” she says. “I grew up with parents who had flower and vegetable gardens everywhere and filled the house with living things all winter long. When you’re surrounded, it becomes an essential part of you. I think I have a farmer gene, and this is how it expresses.”
She was something of slow bloomer, though, when she originally plotted out her career. A graduate of St. Cloud State University, she taught elementary school in St. Cloud after graduating. When her husband’s job brought her and her family to Moorhead in 1968, she continued in local schools.
“But I had two small children and wanted to find something that would let me spend more time at home with them,” she explains. Then a friend, admiring the lush greenery in Alma’s home and yard, sighed that she’d love to have plants, too, but didn’t know what to do with them.
Voila! A brainstorm became a successful home business as Country Greenery Plant Parties took root and flourished. Over eight years starting in 1975, she hosted countless groups of 12 to 20 guests in her home, selling plants of every size and habit and teaching her guests what they needed to know to nurture them.
As her plant business grew, new offshoots blossomed. “It was just when the trend toward living plants was replacing dusty fake plastic,” she recalls. “Gladys Wold came to me when the Holiday Inn added its new pool area. She asked whether I could supply the plants, and then take care of them.” She could, and she did, and Country Greenery’s plant leasing program began. She and her staff continue to care for greenery in businesses throughout Fargo-Moorhead.
Next up: blossoms. In 1984, the new Radisson Hotel downtown wanted flowers for its lobby and restaurant. That helped open the door for her location in the old Dommer Building, where she originally grew green plants. The Fargo shop was added in 1995, when daughter Wendy left the advertising business in the Twin Cities to join her mother’s business and manage the new location. She helped build the home décor and giftware lines and continues to oversee marketing the family enterprise.
“Country Greenery’s growth and changes have always come in response to what our customers ask for. ‘Do you have this?’ ‘Can you get that?’” Alma says. “When we added flowers, they asked for greeting cards, and so that came along. We listen to what customers want us to do, and then – if it’s even remotely possible – we do it.”
Today her industry’s single biggest challenge is the tidal wave of the Internet that’s washed over brick-and-mortar, home-owned merchants like her. “It’s unstoppable,” she says. “The world is changing. That means we need to change, too, and keep up with it.”
She notes wryly that “everyone thinks they can do plants” – from big-box stores and lumberyards to supermarkets and drug stores. But none of the chain stores and diminishing number of locally owned competitors poses the tsunami-like power of online floral order gatherers – the heavily advertised companies that use the Web to reach consumers with lavish promises but often weak follow-through.
“The order gatherers make their money by teasing you into calling an 800 number or ordering on the Net,” she says. “Then they turn around and pass the order on to someone like me.” Some even ship flowers via UPS or FedEx – a potentially disastrous route when boxes of tender blooms are left on doorsteps in the frigid Minnesota and North Dakota climate.
“Customers think they’re saving money,” Alma says. “They aren’t. They are paying the reasonable price they’d get if they ordered locally … plus a fee of $20 or so to these middlemen.
“If people would just compare our everyday prices to the ‘bargains’ they see in those slick online ads, they’d be amazed,” she adds.
Nevertheless, the savvy, experienced businesswoman has taken aggressive steps to compete. The website countrygreenery.com features on online catalog of green and blooming plants, floral arrangements and even gifts for special occasions, along with two of the store’s biggest sellers: floral tributes for funerals and wedding flowers. The website includes secure ordering, same-day delivery (in the local area) and even a smartphone app for Apple and Android mobile devices.
“I’ve been changing ever since Day One,” Alma reflects. “The minute you think you’ve made it and relax … you start sliding in the opposite direction.”
But the rigors of an evolving business, even after more than 40 years, have done nothing to dim the love of green and growing plants that has always inspired her. Sitting in the sunlit south-facing greenhouse area of Country Greenery, where the air – even in February – smells like fresh rain, she muses on the rejuvenating magic of leaves and blossoms.
If you want to add joy to your life, she suggests, “just treat yourself to a loose bouquet. Keep it in your kitchen or your office or wherever you spend the most time.”
Then, she says, breathe in its fragrance deeply: “It really, truly does make a big difference.”
